Against the backdrop of significant scholarship on the relations between the United States and Guatemala in the years leading up to the 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz, it might appear that yet another book would have little to offer scholars of modern Latin America. This is, indeed, well-tilled soil. The overthrow of the leftist government by CIA- and United Fruit Company-supported rebels is understood as one of the most blatant efforts by the United States to assert its economic and political power in Central America. But that is where most scholarly work ends. Stephen Streeter has embraced the heretofore underexamined decade following the coup. The story he tells is of the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to prop up dictators, perpetuate dependency, and thwart populist and nationalist movements, all of which laid the foundations for a bloody civil war that cost more than 200,000 Guatemalan lives.
Streeter’s central argument is that the...
